Tag Archives: Masaai

Two sets of thick, nubby tire tracks disappear over the steep slope. This is a cliff, really, a cliff in remote Tanzania ending 1,500 feet below on the hot, sandy Masaai Plain. It’s not a good place for injuries of any kind, and especially not the bloody kind of gashes sustained after falling off a mountain bike. Blood (and fear) is detected easily by lion, hyena, snake, scorpion and the like in wild places like this.

Today, after five days riding up and over Tanzania’s green, lush Usambara Mountain Range, it is finally time to descend into a harsher, hotter Africa.

Though hilly and rutted roads are the norm in these mountains, mountain-biking the Usambara had been relatively easy so far, as long as you took it slow and steady. For most people in our group of five foreigners in their thirties and forties, this method worked well. I think the cool, misty mornings had something to do with it. I could see, after a few days cycling here, why they call the Usambara “The Switzerland of Tanzania.” We had stopped for a full day and night in the village of Lushoto, singing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” with friendly girls walking home from school, eating sugarcane with happy young boys, whose only use for knives was to cut wild sugarcane. Passing through the farm towns, “helloooo-muzzungu!” rang out from anyone working the fields, and children pushed us up the hills, grabbing the backs of our seats and running furiously behind us, laughing the whole way. The mountains felt safe, giddy almost, with happy monkeys in the trees above us and happy children nearly everywhere else.

But the exit route out of this veritable African idyll, so far, isn’t so pleasant. Our guides, two Tanzanian brothers, decided to lead us out of the Usambara and onto the Masai Plain via a new route, a little-used cattle track beginning in the village of Mtae (muh-tie). It’s main purpose was to switch-back down the mountainous shelf known as the Masai Steppes. This track, peppered with thorns and full of deep rocky ruts, gave this amateur cyclist chills on a rather hot day. I’d never seen anything tougher on which to ride, and especially on a bike laden with too many tee-shirts stuffed in the panniers. I rode my brakes (always) and got off the bike (often). Whether riding or walking, I swore, loudly and steadily, at this horrid little cattle track. Local women, hiking the track uphill with heavy baskets of firewood on their heads, smiled knowingly as I shrieked and swore and sweated past them.

* * *

Yassin Madiwa, one of our two guides, saw the errant tire tracks first, where the riders had obviously missed the switchback and instead rolled off the slope. He peered down. Definitely no trail. Just thorns, bushy tangles of trees, loose sandy soil, and rocks. He got off his bike, examined the tracks and thought, Could they … have ridden down this? The two women were the least experienced cyclists in the group of riders, made up of three American women and two Englishmen.

Certainly the others wouldn’t have lost the trail like this, Yassin thought, endangering themselves and possibly the rest of the group in one sweeping, poorly-thought-out decision. It was only the seventh day of an 11-day cycling trip. It was not a day for losing two American women on the Masai Steppes.